The King Neighborhood Welcomes Portland's First Upscale Balkan Restaurant
One of the Portland area's most promising chefs is about to take his pop-up to its permanent location. Vedran Jordan will host the grand opening for his Alma on Friday, June 13. Jordan's run to this opening is the stuff of modern-day restaurant fable: He came to the country as a 12-year-old refugee from Sarajevo, cut his teeth cooking at Bamboo Sushi, Gado Gado, Oma's Hideaway, with chef Gregory Gourdet at Kann, and then opened Alma in honor of his mother. Getting ready for the Balkan restaurant's opening, he's focused on making sure the kitchen lives up to all that hype. 'I feel extremely lucky to have the crew that I have,' Jordan says. 'Currently, everyone is really putting everything they have into it. I really can't be more thankful.'
The food and drink at the reservation-only restaurant include a suite of 'Ottoman-era' dishes. Since announcing the debut, a few more items have been added to the opening roster. The imam bayildi is a particular highlight in Jordan's mind, a half-roasted eggplant marinated overnight in water with added Vegeta — sort of like a 'Bosnian MSG,' Jordan says — before the innards are scooped out and tossed with aromatics, chilies, and tomatoes. It's then served with toum yogurt and green zhoug. The kanpachi crudo arrives dressed in black Moroccan salt, housemade citrus kosho, and ginger, the fish itself sourced from local purveyor Aji Fish Butchery. The baba ghanoush and lamb shank are no small feats, either.
The drinks at Alma are thoughtfully prepared by beverage director Chris Mateja, formerly of Nightingale. Liquors from all over, including South America and the Balkans, feature on the vibrant, bright cocktails. There are three rakias on the menu, too. Rakia is a Balkan fruit brandy, and at Alma, grape, plum, and a secret third flavor are all featured, with three more coming down the road. The spirits are custom-made for the restaurant by Andy Garrison from Tuff Talk Distilling.
Mostly, the restaurant — a pretty space in the King neighborhood — is meant to be a positive impact on the community. During the first week, five percent of all sales proceeds will be donated to The Sameer Project, a donations-based aid initiative led by Palestinians. On the local level, Jeremy Fong works as the chef de cuisine, Mo Morales as sous chef, and Emily Gilmer as general manager. This cast of characters is just as important to Jordan as any other part of the business; he says, if he's lucky, Alma will be known for its hard working, compassionate pros. 'Something that's very sustainable,' he says, 'I want to make sure people are pursuing their passions and always learning.'
Alma (5237 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) opens Friday, June 13 with opening hours from 4 to 9 p.m. Thursday to Monday, by reservation only.
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Eater
5 hours ago
- Eater
The King Neighborhood Welcomes Portland's First Upscale Balkan Restaurant
One of the Portland area's most promising chefs is about to take his pop-up to its permanent location. Vedran Jordan will host the grand opening for his Alma on Friday, June 13. Jordan's run to this opening is the stuff of modern-day restaurant fable: He came to the country as a 12-year-old refugee from Sarajevo, cut his teeth cooking at Bamboo Sushi, Gado Gado, Oma's Hideaway, with chef Gregory Gourdet at Kann, and then opened Alma in honor of his mother. Getting ready for the Balkan restaurant's opening, he's focused on making sure the kitchen lives up to all that hype. 'I feel extremely lucky to have the crew that I have,' Jordan says. 'Currently, everyone is really putting everything they have into it. I really can't be more thankful.' The food and drink at the reservation-only restaurant include a suite of 'Ottoman-era' dishes. Since announcing the debut, a few more items have been added to the opening roster. The imam bayildi is a particular highlight in Jordan's mind, a half-roasted eggplant marinated overnight in water with added Vegeta — sort of like a 'Bosnian MSG,' Jordan says — before the innards are scooped out and tossed with aromatics, chilies, and tomatoes. It's then served with toum yogurt and green zhoug. The kanpachi crudo arrives dressed in black Moroccan salt, housemade citrus kosho, and ginger, the fish itself sourced from local purveyor Aji Fish Butchery. The baba ghanoush and lamb shank are no small feats, either. The drinks at Alma are thoughtfully prepared by beverage director Chris Mateja, formerly of Nightingale. Liquors from all over, including South America and the Balkans, feature on the vibrant, bright cocktails. There are three rakias on the menu, too. Rakia is a Balkan fruit brandy, and at Alma, grape, plum, and a secret third flavor are all featured, with three more coming down the road. The spirits are custom-made for the restaurant by Andy Garrison from Tuff Talk Distilling. Mostly, the restaurant — a pretty space in the King neighborhood — is meant to be a positive impact on the community. During the first week, five percent of all sales proceeds will be donated to The Sameer Project, a donations-based aid initiative led by Palestinians. On the local level, Jeremy Fong works as the chef de cuisine, Mo Morales as sous chef, and Emily Gilmer as general manager. This cast of characters is just as important to Jordan as any other part of the business; he says, if he's lucky, Alma will be known for its hard working, compassionate pros. 'Something that's very sustainable,' he says, 'I want to make sure people are pursuing their passions and always learning.' Alma (5237 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) opens Friday, June 13 with opening hours from 4 to 9 p.m. Thursday to Monday, by reservation only. Sign up for our newsletter.
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Dyer, now 67 years old and for a decade a USC professor, is a cosmopolitan author whose output — fiction, nonfiction, both — has often spanned far-flung locales. Yet this project's geography is circumscribed, its borders hedged. If Dyer has grown sentimental about the England of his upbringing, his nostalgia is a subtle critique of how optimism in big government has grown worse for wear — 'Homework' bursts with working-class pride, a fond and mournful belief in the possibility of the British welfare state. Still, the fact of remembering can sometimes feel more important to Dyer than how events translate. He leads us through a grove of anecdotes, some more meaningful than others. Dyer conjures a macabre, powerful image of his father in a hospital bed after a botched surgery, wearing a badge that reads 'Private Health Care Makes Me Sick,' and spends a few too many pages on the delight of eating 'sweets' (not candy — too Yankee), which nonetheless produces this glorious quip: 'During one discussion of various oral afflictions, my mum exclaimed 'I've had gum boils,' as if announcing an achievement that was in danger of being unjustly overlooked.' Humor is his life raft because he neglects to plot much of a course around the seas of memory. The book's languor can be ponderous and vintage, more 20th century than 21st. Yet the text's unhurried recollections reflect its content: 'Homework' feels leisurely as if to reflect the functional, socialist-adjacent government that allows its characters to subsist. If only, Dyer implies, Americans with the misfortune of paying for their own dental care could afford the rite of developing gum boils. 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What 'Homework' does best is keep these possibilities open while never having an answer for whether the elder Dyer's annual ceremony with the Cadbury box was an act of love. The real homework is the labor that we do when we spend our whole lives wondering. Felsenthal is a fiction writer, poet, critic and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Atlantic and other publications.
